Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Cartographer's Cabin

I have a rough sketch for the Tales of Monkey Island pre-order cover in the pipe waiting for final approval. I'll post it at some point soon. In the meantime, here's a color test done for Monkey Island 2 LeChuck's Revenge probably painted in 1990. In this game we had the luxury of being able to draw backgrounds on paper and scan them giving us a greater range. This was my first background test of a cartographer's cabin painted in gouache. Peter Chan was a fiend with color markers and we ended up doing a lot of the backgrounds in marker as it was much quicker than painting. Gouache 5 X 9

23 comments:

I have a question about this process: Did you do any post-process alterations to the digital picture after you scanned it in? I've thought a lot of how to do this because some day I plan to create a game much like the SCUMM games, but I know that the way I've scanned in stuff looks very odd. Not naturally fitting like these scenes.

Hey uhm is there any chance that you are going to release more poster versions (mb at telltale) of those Sam and Max paintings from the end of Surfing the Highway? I am totally in love with the one in which Sam and Max are in the office with all that stuff around. So much detail.

Wow!!! This is all a dream!!! Finally we return to talk of Monkey Island!! If you want see I have done a little tribute to Monkey Island 5 in my blog :)Thnx Purcell whitout you we never can't played whit a soo bautifull game!!! MI2 is my favourite will se a remake whit this draws in higth resolution will be fantastic!!!!

Steve, I just found Defenders of Dynatron City online and I saw your name in the credits. Have you got any artwork or stories about that? I thought it was actually very enjoyable to watch and I'm surprised it wasn't picked up. The animation was pretty excellent, too!

Johnny Walker--I do still have the covers that I drew for the Dynatron comic books but that's about it.

My best story about the animated pilot: Originally the voice of Doctor Mayhem was performed by Christopher Walken. It was lively and hilarious. For god-knows-what-reason the producers at the last minute replaced him with a more cartooney voice.

Glen Fernández--I used to be able to paint a gouache illustration in a couple of days if necessary. I never used it quite right. I use acrylic now because I can maintain better contrast. I think my gouache paintings are a bit chalky looking in retrospect. But I would like to take it up again and see if I could do a better job now.

Johnny Walker--Mignola, Adams and I lived in separate apartments in the same building and yes, we played Fizzball once. There is a picture of it at Telltale Games revived "Summer of Sam & Max" site:http://www.telltalegames.com/summerofsamandmax/history/history1b/

Aractus--Yes, I still have the Monkey 2 painting. It hangs in my office at Pixar in that huge, bombastic frame.

Aractus and Johnny Walker--I don't own the reproduction rights to the Monkey Island covers. If LucasArts wanted to sell prints of the old covers I would think that's cool. You could ask them.

hey this was in the lucasarts book as well! (coincidence? or did you dig it up for that purpose?) I would also love to see more... I had hoped that rogue leaders would have more stuff on the old adventure games...but now that I think about it they should really put out a big "art of"-book dedicated solely to the handpainted adventure games! I would buy it quick-smart! who do I nag about that?